Import Photos From Cameras and SD Cards Using the Image Capture App On Your Mac

If you need to get photo from your camera, an SD card, or an iPhone or iPad, but don't want them in the Photos app, you can do it with the Image Capture app that is already on your Mac.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can use the Image Capture App on your Mac to download photos from your camera. 
MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 2000 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/Patreon. There you could read more about it. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.  
So most Mac users use the Photos App to download photos from either their iPhone or camera and then manage them across their devices. However, sometimes you don't want photos in the Photos App. For instance maybe you use your Photos App for your personal photos but you also take photos for work and you don't want those mixed in with your regular photos. So it would be great to be able to download those from your camera or from your iPhone and have them as files in folders separate from your regular photos in the Photos App.
You can do that using the Image Capture App. That's an app that you already have on your Mac. It comes with macOS. This app is in your Applications Folder. So in the Finder if you go to Applications and then you scroll through what's there you're going to find Image Capture right there. But you could also easily get to it through Spotlight or through Launchpad. 
Let's launch it right here and this brings it up. Now I don't have anything connected here so it shows nothing. But if I take the  SD card from my DSLR camera and I insert it into the SD card slot on my Mac Studio then I'll be able to access the photos that are on this card. If you don't have a SD card slot on your Mac, most Mac's don't, then you can get a pretty inexpensive SD card reader that plugs into a USB port and, of course, a lot of cameras also allow you to connect them using a USB cable. So you're using your camera as the SD card reader. Anyway you do it as soon as you insert the SD card then you're going to see it appear here in Image Capture. 
So, there's this one. Now note that it also appears in the Finder. So if I create a New Finder Window here I can actually see it under Locations. So there's the card there. I can go through these folders here and try to find those photos. So, that is another option. But the Image Capture App gives you a lot more features than that. If I select the card here I'm going to actually see previews of all the photos that are here in a list. I can switch between List View or Icon View for all of these. In List view, though, I get a lot of different columns here. Expand this and I can see here I've got Name, Kind, Date, File Size, the width and height of the photos, the camera settings like Aperture, Shutter Speed, all this stuff right here. I can resize all these columns including the Preview over here. So if I resize this first column by dragging to the left I can actually make the thumbnails smaller. But this is kind of the maximum size, the largest you'll get. 
In Icon View you've got this slider up here that allows you to increase or decrease the size. Now at the bottom you've got your Import Location. So here I've got it set to the Pictures Folder. But I can choose another folder or I can choose Other and select any folder that I want including making new folders. So the basic idea is to select the photos that you want to download. You can click to Select. You can use the Command Key to select others. You can use the Shift Key to select a range. Once you've got the ones that you want and you have it set to Import to the folder that you want, then you can just click the download button here. Then it will download those files and put them in those folders. 
I can also choose to import directly into the Photos App from Image Capture. I can choose to have them Open in the Preview App or go directly to a new message in Mail. If I select Preview the same photo will just open up as a document in Preview. Then giving me the chance to Save it. Notice the green checkmarks here. These show that these are the ones you've already downloaded. When you try to download it again it won't let you. It's already there. But if I change locations, like let's go to the Desktop with this, you can see the checkmarks are gone. It recognizes that those pictures are there in the Pictures folder but not in the Desktop folder. So really handy for being able to selectively download what you need and kind of keep track. 
Now you also have this download All button here. So if you just want to quickly download all the photos from the card to this location then you could do it without having to select them all first. 
Now you have a lot of special tricks that you can do here. One is using the Context Menu. So you can Control Click, two-finger click on a trackpad, right click on a mouse, on anyone of these. When you do so you get this little Context Menu. So here I can just decide to import this individual one. I could delete it, so remove it from the SD card without importing it. If it is one I've already downloaded I can then use Reveal in Finder to go to it very easily and I can still delete it. But you can see Import is grayed out. The file is already at this location. 
You can also just drag and drop. So I can select this one here and drag and drop it to any location I want.  I'll drag and drop it to the Desktop. Notice how the checkmark isn't there because it is still looking at pictures for where it places the checkmark that I put on the Desktop. But this is really handy if you want to drag and drop different photos to different folders. You can just move this to the side, have a Finder window open here with your different folders showing and you could drag and drop into folders easily. Also, with the card selected you can go to this button here at the top and you can decide what happens when this card is inserted. So this functionality goes beyond image capture. Here I can have it that when this card or camera is connected I can have it automatically open an App. I can select one of these or any other app to have it automatically open whenever you insert the card. So this is handy to know not just for setting it but for removing it, switching to new application if you find that you've got a camera SD card that automatically launches an app when you connect it. Then this is where you can go when you set it to no application so it will stop doing that. 
You also have this button here which actually rotates a photo depends on the file type though. These are all raw type photos so that's not active. But this photo is a regular jpeg. So actually will rotate the photo like this so when it imports it imports correctly to begin with. 
Note you can also plug in an iPhone connected with a cable and you'll be able to see it here as well. When I go to it I can see the photos that are there and I can do the same things with these. I can select them. I can select where to import them to. I can Control Click and you can see there's Import and there's Delete. So if I want to pull photos directly off my iPhone, or perhaps an iPhone that is not setup as my primary iPhone like one for work, I can do so with Image Capture just like with any other camera. 
One thing about Image Capture is it doesn't get a lot of love from Apple. It hasn't been updated in a little while. It still works perfectly well on the current set of Macs. I have notice that sometimes it does strange things. Like I notice that sometimes when you download a photo it will automatically open in the default app, usually Preview and other times it doesn't. I just downloads and that's it. Of course Image Capture can be used for more than just the reading SD cards and cameras. You can also use it for scanners. I've talked about that in previous videos. 
So the pictures you take aren't all the same. You use cameras and even iPhones for work sometimes. You want to have pictures go to different places. Definitely get to know the Image Capture App on your Mac. 
Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 5 Responses to “Import Photos From Cameras and SD Cards Using the Image Capture App On Your Mac”

Luis

11 months ago

Could it be posible to run a shell script using the option of "Connecting this camera opens" ?
I already have a zsh script that works for me.

John C.

I understand that you are trying to show people the different ways to do a task (which is useful), but I really do not see any advantage to using Image Capture to pull images off of an SD card when Finder does exactly the same thing. One difference is the ability to change the icon size in list view - Finder can't do that. Another difference is that right clicking on an item in Finder gives way more actions than Image Capture can. Still, good job as always with the video.

Gary Rosenzweig

John: Another advantage is that you don't need to understand your SD card's file structure. Some of them can have files in multiple folders and it is easy to miss some types of images.

Daemon Baizan

I use the Image Capture app to offload images from phones and iOS devices. Much more straightforward than the Photos app, no interference with cloud images, and there’s the option to delete upon download. With Image Capture, I can use my iOS devices as the true professional tools they can be.